There has been a lot of talk lately about income inequality and stagnant wages for workers and a shrinking middle class and more people living in poverty than we have experienced in some time. Concerns which I think are important to take seriously. And wrapped up in the discussion of wages and minimum wage is the discussion of why people are poor.
Are they lazy?
Are they not willing to take responsibility for their own lives?
Are they single parents?
Do they come from single parent households?
Have they become dependent on welfare or on handouts from others?

The public discussion around these issues lacks depth and is doled out in sound bites and avoids the complicated and challenging interplay between personal responsibility and community/social support. In a conversation this past week about the headlines in the news, the concern about single parent households was brought up. I asked the person with whom I was speaking what had kept her marriage together.
Her answer…
The example of their parents.
The hard work they decided to do.
The support of community, church, friends.
I know it doesn’t always happen that way.
Even with the best intentions and the hard work and community and family support sometimes relationships fall apart, but her answered mirrored my thoughts about my own marriage.

Research over the last 30-40 years has documented the rise of individualism in our culture and the decline of those institutions and informal structures which held communities together. There is much to lament about that and I think we are paying the price, but unlike some the answer is not to go back. While there was good in those structures, there was also bad. Because of social norms woman suffered in silence and isolation in abusive relationships which needed to be named for what they were. Those of us who care deeply about community and the communities in which we live need to reframe the debate in more helpful, holistic terms and call out those on either end of the political or social spectrum who frame an important and complicated issue in simplistic terms.

They sat down at the table with us.
Two high school students facing a half dozen adults.
They were there to share with us what it was like for them in high school.
As we listened, they spoke of the support and encouragement they felt from teachers and staff. And, they shared that, for the most part, they felt included in the larger school community. They were grateful for the education they were receiving and the opportunities before them. When it was our turn to ask them questions, I asked this.
Did they feel the same level of support and encouragement and inclusion in the larger community in which they lived as they experienced in school?
Their answer:
No.
Here is the back story.
Both of the students with whom we had the opportunity to talk had come to this country and moved into our community at the beginning of high school. When they moved here neither of them spoke a word of English. Yet, here they were just a few years later succeeding academically in a high performing high school, and telling a group of adults who they did not know about their experience.

There were two take aways for me.
First, kudos to our high school for creating an environment in which all students have the opportunity to succeed. This is not to say that there are not significant issue that continue to face and challenge our school district. There are, but on this front our schools are working hard to create an environment that includes more than it excludes.
My second take away is that our communities are far behind our schools.
That is to say the adults in our communities are far behind the young adults in our communities. On a daily basis these two young adults, who I am sure are representative of many others, walk into a supportive atmosphere in the morning and walk out into a much less supportive atmosphere when school is over for the day.
As adults…
As community members…
We need to do a better job.
We need to catch up to our schools.
We need to acknowledge that our community is a safe, supportive place for some and an much less safe and much less supportive place for others. And the dividing line often has something to do with language and color of skin and economic background.

On Monday of this week (May 20, 2013), in the New York Times, Op-Ed columnist David Brooks wrote about two studies on word usage that have been conducted using Google’s database of 5.2 million books published between 1500 and 2008. Referencing two studies, Brook writes:“Between 1960 and 2008 individualistic words and phrases increasingly overshadowed communal words and phrases. That is to say, over those 48 years, words and phrases like “personalized,” “self,” “standout,” “unique,” “I come first” and “I can do it myself” were used more frequently. Communal words and phrases like “community,” “collective,” “tribe,” “share,” “united,” “band together” and “common good” receded.” The trend in the direction of individualism and away from community mirrors what sociologists, especially Robert Bellah, have been telling us, and what those of us affiliated with organized religion have been experiencing.

Which leads me to this…If the best of our religious/spiritual impulse turns us in the direction of compassion and kindness and generosity and gratitude, all of which are words that lean in the direction of community, where do we turn to be reminded of those values and to have those them reinforced in our lives especially when those values are increasingly counter-cultural? Religious institutions – churches, synagogues, mosques, temples – are one place, but we also know fewer people affiliate with organized religion today than 50 years ago. So, what do we build in their place?

I don’t think doing nothing is a viable option.Being counter-cultural;Going against the grain;Is almost impossible to do alone.And, reflecting on my own life, to the extent that I am able my ability to be compassionate and kind and generous and grateful has be nurtured and deepened and sustained through my interaction with and my accountability to others. The African understanding of ubuntu is accurate. I am who I am because of who we are together.

So, if I am correct and doing nothing is not a viable option if we want to be and to become a compassionate people, what can we build together? It does not have to be or to look like what we know as church, but I do think it will require some intentionality and commitment and accountability and presence.

After I wrote my last post about church (I use the church in its broadest and best sense) being a place to practice those things that nurture our best values and our best selves and expand the circles we draw around our lives, I recalled a lecture I attended a number of years ago. The presenter was a sports psychologist who worked with the New York Mets baseball team. His presentation was not on professional baseball or professional sports, but on the changes that were happening (and have continued to happen) in the sports programs in which our children participate.

He noted that the change that was taking place was most children’s sports programs were now being organized, run and managed by adults. Whereas a generation ago, most sports activities in which children participated were organized by the children themselves. Kids would show up at the ball field. Sides would be chosen. The rules agreed upon. When a disagreement arose it would be worked out often by agreeing to a do over. While the skill level today might be greater with semi-professional coaches who oversee practice and training, children’s love of the game and the negotiating and conflict resolution skills they learned by playing together on their own are diminished.

I thought about that lecture quite a bit as my children grew up and participated in organized sports, but after my last post I began to think about it in terms of the church. Longer than children’s sports programs, the church (in its most traditional sense) has been organized by a group of “adults” who organize, run and set the rules for the game. If you want to “play” you have to play according to our rules. What is now happening, it seems to me, is that more and more people are saying we don’t want to play the “game” in that way anymore. We want to show up at the playground and whoever is there we will organize the “game” and negotiate the rules and work together to figure out the best way forward.

Which makes me wonder…If we (and our children) have lost something in overly organizing their sports activities, is there something to be gained by individuals and groups of people reclaiming their own initiative in redefining church or community or spirituality? It will certainly look and feel different than what it does today, but it may end up being more thoughtful and more vital than what we have known for some time.

Here is what I think church should be or could be about:A place to practice.A place to practice kindness.And compassion.And generosity.And gratitude.A place to practice saying Please and Thank you not just for what we need or have, but please and thank you on behalf of another some of whom we know and many of whom we don’t.Church could be and maybe should be a place where we practice being (or coming closer to being) our best selves.

But, more often than not we get it wrong.And church becomes a place of shoulds and oughts;Right and wrong;My right and your wrong.A place where if we know the rules and the rituals we belong and if we don’t we feel like we don’t have a place.A place of believing in Jesus instead of being inspired by the words and witness of Jesus.A place where God is understood more as a noun than as a verb.A place of being right and getting it right more than a place to practice.

What if we could be more the first than the second?What if we began to believe that any place we practice being our best selves was church? And, anyone with whom we practice kindness and compassion and generosity and gratitude was our community offaith? Would we began to pay attention in a different way because that which we know and name as God could be present in each and every one of those moments?What would change for us?Would we look at our lives and each other differently?I wonder…

Last week I was in Las Conchitas, Nicaragua.I began each day by taking my cup of coffee and a plastic chair and sitting alongside the dirt road that runs through that little community. I watched as a child ran down to the local pulperia and then back home with a bag of bread for breakfast. I watched as children in the crisp, clean blue and white uniforms arrived for school. I watched as couples (and sometimes families) pedaled by on their bicycle. I watched as the same farmer at the same time each day led his cattle down the road to the field where they would graze for the day. I saw people walking, people on bicycles, people on horse drawn carts and people on motorcycles. Not once in all the mornings I sat there did a see a car.

And, as I sat there each morning greetings were exchanged.A nod of the head.A shy “Good morning.”A wave of a hand.Something that does not happen very often when I walk down the sidewalk of the Village where I have lived for almost 25 years. Here eyes are averted and we tend to treat passers-by more as strangers than friends.

I felt content as I sat there each morning.I felt connected in some small way to those who passed by.I miss that now that I am home.I miss the slower start to the day.I miss the sense of community.I only half jokingly tell people that I continue to lead service learning trips like this because there are lessons I still need to learn. One morning as I sat alongside that road with my cup of coffee, I realized that one of those lessons for me to learn is to take what I knew and experienced there – the walking rather than racing from one thing to the next and the acknowledgement of another rather than the averting of the eyes – and translate it into how I live here.